Alone.
“Hello?”
He jolts immediately to his feet.
A girl is there, standing in the doorway where there should have been no one. Silent, when he should have heard her approach. She looks very small between the room’s wide white columns. The lights of the chandelier emblazon her features, turning her elfin in the gloom.
He knows he ought to say something. Something clever. Something cutting. Instead, he holds himself still and charts her in silence. Her hair is a mousy blonde, cut just beneath her chin. She’s dressed similarly to Tristan Choi—in Hornbeam colors. A brown jacket. A pleated skirt. A regimental tie and scuffed leather shoes.
The hunger within him comes screaming to the surface. Not because he didn’t expect to see her here—there have been girls at initiation before—but because of her hand, held out like an offering between them. A deep gash runs across her palm. Blood gathers in the shallow creases, red and tempting.
He stares, and she stares back. He knows what it is she sees. There’s a hard pulse of hunger behind his eyes, an ache that chips at his control. When he gets like this—ravenous—his appetite leaves him bruised all over.
He knows what they call him, down in the valley towns—knows why they cross themselves when they pass too close to the trees, why they whisper his name in the midnight dark.
If the Gravewood is hell on earth, then he is its devil.
“That’s quite an entrance,” he says, doing what he can to ignore the trickle of blood along her fingers. “I’m curious to hear how you made it to the lodge in one piece.”
“I walked.” Her voice is low and sweet, an unplaceable accent softening its edges. His intrigue intensifies.
“Alone?”
“Doyousee anyone else?”
It comes out combative—more so, perhaps, than she meant it to. Her face betrays nothing, but he can hear her heart hammering against her rib cage. His gives a single, hard thump in reply. A wordless call-and-response that leaves him rattled.
“You should never have made it here on your own. The trees in this part of the woods are carnivorous. They whisper all kinds of things when the wind blows.”
The girl’s shoulder lifts in a shrug. “I must not have heard them.”
Ridiculously, he finds himself biting back a smile. He shouldn’t besmilingat her impertinence—he should be throwing her to the wolves.
“I’m impressed,” he says instead. He means it. “I’ve seen hardened forest rangers follow the voice of a loved one into the pines.”
There’s a beat, during which he can see her fitting his words together. Then, “Maybe I have a secret weapon.”
This time, his smile breaks loose of its own volition. “Maybe you do.”
Silence falls again. She doesn’t rush to fill it, and so neither does he. He listens to the hard beat of her heart in the quiet. He tries to imagine her in the woods all alone, ignoring the beckoning of the birch trees, the hungry pleading of the ancient hemlocks—faces of the devoured grafted into their trunks. She stares back at him all the while, her blood gathering at her fingertips. He clears his throat.
“Unfortunately, you’re too late. I’ve filled all available slots.”
She blinks, surprised. “I’m not here to Turn.”
His curiosity is so deep, it’s tectonic. He wonders what her blood would taste like against the flat of his tongue. He wonders if Achilles knew, upon meeting Patroclus, that it would end in tragedy. If he went in with both eyes open anyway.
“I assume you have a name,” he says.
“It’s Shea.”
He likes how it sounds. One syllable, soft as a gasp.
“And you know who I am.”
“I do. You’re the Gravewood D—”
“Lys.” One syllable. Sharp as a knife. He angles his head to the side—watches her swallow his name the way he swallowed hers. The whole room smells like blood. It makes him feel stark raving mad.
